Uber Drivers Are Quietly Rating & Blacklisting Passengers

Anyone who’s hired an Uber car knows that you can give your experience a star rating when it’s done, but the thing you probably aren’t aware of is that Uber drivers are keeping tabs on passengers, and that supbar customers can end up being blacklisted.

“What we want is for people to respect the driver, and for drivers to respect the customer. We go above and beyond,” one veteran Uber driver explains to CBS Los Angeles. “They can give us a low rating. It can go both ways. That way, we can police each other.”

And this isn’t some informal system where drivers get together and say things like “Don’t pick up the Chris guy; he’s too handsome.” It’s a system where drivers can actually decide to not answer calls from passengers with low scores.

On Bay Area woman tells CBS that she found out she’d been blacklisted after having trouble getting an Uber to pick her up.

“I asked the driver what was going on. And he basically told me I had a really low Uber rating: under three out of five,” she explains. She believes her low score is unfair, claiming it likely resulted from her choosing to work on her phone during a ride than have a conversation with the driver. “I feel really judged for being blacklisted for not being really friendly.”

If you want to know your rating in the system, you can ask your driver. Uber says that a future version of the app will allow passengers to see what they have been rated by drivers so at least they won’t be standing outside their houses wondering why no one will pick them up.